Meet the Author with Tom Lee

6.30pm Friday 17th November

Wivenhoe Bookshop

It is a great pleasure to welcome writer Tom Lee back to the bookshop. His last visit was for the  launch of his acclaimed debut short story collection, Greenfly. This time he’ll be talking about his new novel, The Alarming Palsy of James Orr.

About the Book

James Orr – husband, father, reliable employee and all round model citizen – wakes one morning to find himself quite transformed. There’s no way he can go into the office, and the doctors aren’t able to help. Waiting for the affliction to pass, he wanders the idyllic estate where he lives, with its pretty woodland, uniform streets and perfectly manicured lawns.

But there are cracks in the veneer. And as his orderly existence begins to unravel, it appears that James himself may not be the man he thought he was.A story that consistently confounds expectations, The Alarming Palsy of James Orr introduces a writer of extraordinary and disturbing talents.

About the Author

Tom Lee was born in Essex in 1974 and attended the University of East Anglia, the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Goldsmith College.

Tom Lee

Tom’s writing has appeared in the Sunday Times, Esquire and Prospect in the UK, the Dublin Review in Ireland and in Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope All Story in the United States, among others. In 2012 he was shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award.

He has also been awarded the Royal Society of Literature’s Brookleaze Grant and two Arts Council grants for his fiction. He currently teaches undergraduate and postgraduate creative writing at Goldsmiths College.

Praise for The Alarming Palsy of James Orr

‘Politely calamitous and deeply affecting. Tom Lee can actually do what many writers think they can do’ Cynan Jones

‘This is contemporary suburban noir, which, with a wry touch and a lopsided wink to Revolutionary Road, skilfully lures you into a delicately creeping nightmare’ Ross Raisin

‘A slim shiver of dread and paranoia, Tom Lee’s superb debut novel explores the darkness that exists millimetres beneath the seemingly normal, regular world. It is a read-in-one sitting fable of considerable power and skill’ Stuart Evers

Praise for  Greenfly

‘Fizzing with an energy at once dark and playful, swift in its impact, enduring in its effect. Lee can conjure a mood in the twist of a sentence. He shifts from voice to voice with ease and is very quotable. Deftly, wryly, Lee leaves us squirming in our seats ‘ The Times Literary Supplement